Phil on Film Index

Thursday, May 14, 2015

"I like to film reality when it's beautiful, when it's ugly, when it's unpleasant, I don't care." - An Interview with Olivier Assayas

André Téchiné's Rendez-vous was a breakthrough film for both screenwriter Olivier Assayas and star Juliette Binoche in 1985, but over the course of the subsequent three decades the pair only collaborated on the 2008 masterwork Summer Hours. In 2013 Binoche decided to take the initiative and called Assayas out of the blue, asking him to write something that they could make together, and he responded by creating a complex study of fame, ageing and culture in the 21st century. Clouds of Sils Maria stars Binoche as Maria Enders, an actress plunged into crisis as she prepares to star in a new production of a play she last performed in twenty years earlier, but this time she is playing the older characters who is seduced and destroyed by a younger woman. As she rehearses the play with her assistant – played with great wit and understatement by Kristen Stewart – the lines between truth and artifice become increasingly blurred, and Assayas's typically adroit, intelligent, fluid filmmaking ensures it is an engrossing, stimulating experience. I met him in London last week to discuss it.This project began when Juliette asked you to
write something that you could make together quickly. After she had
made that request, did this story come easily to you? Do you usually
write quickly?

Sometimes it does come
easily and sometimes it does not. In this case, I felt confident that
I had the elements to build a film fairly early in the process. I
spoke with Juliette and called her back a week later and said “OK,
Juliette, I will try to do this”, but I only called her back
because I sensed I had two or three elements that I could articulate.
It was a bit of a surprise, because it happens once in a while that
you discuss possible films with actors and say things like “I would
really like to work with you...I admire you so much...I would love to
write something for you,” and it never happens. With Juliette it was
based on the fact that we had history, that we had known each other
for a very long time and had strangely parallel careers, in the sense
that we were both attracted by the notion of stepping out of France
and making movies that had a richer dialogue with international film culture. We did it
coming from completely different places but that's where we ended up.

What about writing
something for a specific actor, is that something you have done
often? How does that change your process?

I did it a couple of
times. I wrote Clean for Maggie Cheung, I wrote Boarding Gate for
Asia Argento, but that's pretty much it. Oh, and in a certain way I
wrote Irma Vep also for Maggie. But Clouds of Sils Maria is specific
in the sense that I feel I am going further, while the other movies
were a bit on the surface. I mean, Clean is a melodrama written for
Maggie but ultimately it could have been another actress playing it,
and Irma Vep I wrote for her but I hardly knew her at the time and I
had a very abstract notion of who she was. With Asia, I hardly knew
her and I wrote this kind of action movie B-thriller – or
Z-thriller, if you like [laughs] – around her. Here I am just
dealing with it. I'm not just using Juliette or just being inspired
by her, I'm trying to understand her, to explore what she is doing
and understand the process. I'm trying to articulate my fantasy of
her with something that's universal, one person trying to connect
with emotions we all share. It's a complicated question and it's not
something I've ever really thought about, but I do think there's
something different going on.

If you are writing your
fantasy of Juliette's life, does she then have to push back against
some of those ideas to bring her own perspective to it and make it a
more rounded character?

She had to appropriate
it, and she started working very early. I gave her the screenplay as
soon as I had finished it and she was very quickly calling me and
saying “On page 32 there is this line, I don't think she would say
this...I think this is wrong...I'm not sure what she is saying,” and I
would tell her that we will change stuff a million times when we
start shooting so please do adapt it however you feel comfortable.
She has to appropriate things very early in the process, and what I
knew of Juliette from my previous experiences is that sometimes she
can feel a bit stuck within what she has originally envisioned. It is
not her first language so I thought she would be scared of moving
away from what she had memorised and the work she had done with the
dialogue coach. I didn't know if she would move away
from that comfort zone, but what made the film work is that I saw on
the very first day that she did not care and that it was a
completely different Juliette than I had known before. She was
incredibly open and patient, and happy to be trying new things and
taking risks. I believe in instinct in movies, I hate rehearsing and
I don't like table reads or whatever, but I think everything should
be focused on bringing the actors to the point where they can make
something happen in the smoothest and least-directed way.

I know you prefer to
have minimal screenplays and to allow a lot of freedom for the film
to develop as you shoot, but in Clouds of Sils Maria you also have
this play within the film, and that text has to be very specific as
it comments on the central relationship.

Obviously it's a play I
wrote, but you're right, in those scenes I can't really play around.
There are long moments in the film when they are rehearsing the play
and they have very little room to reinvent. Still, between those bits
they have ways to adlib, rephrase things, adapt it and...again, I
don't think there's a better word than appropriate. It's just about
making it into spoken language as opposed to a wooden script.

Is working in theatre
something that interests you at all? It seems to be the anithesis of
the way you like to work in film.

Yes, you're right. I
have never been attracted to working in theatre because it is
ephemerous. You do it and after three months it's gone, and only a
few people remember it. “Oh yeah, I saw that, it was great...” I
think the only way I could relate to theatre is to write for theatre, why not.

I know one of the
reference points for you has been The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant,
but I think that film is so cinematic and so much about what
Fassbinder and Michael Ballhaus do with the camera, it's hard for me
to imagine it working on stage. So it still feels like you are
approaching theatre through cinema.

Yes, I only know it as
a movie. I had the book and at some point I wanted to use elements of
the play but it did not work, possibly for the reasons that you are
describing. I knew I wanted the dynamic from that story between an
older woman and the younger woman, but it did not connect with the
situation I was imagining so I re-wrote my own version. You know, it
reminded me of the great Italian director Carmelo Bene, who was an
underground filmmaker in the '70s and would be doing really weird
stagings like Macbeth in 25 minutes. Straight to the essentials!
[laughs]

It has been suggested
that the playwright in the film is inspired by Fassbinder too.

Not really, it's a
mixture. It's part Bergman, part Fassbinder, part Thomas Bernhard, he
was just one of those radical central European artists.

Are these all figures
who you are inspired by?

Fassbinder was a big
influence for similar reasons as Ingmar Bergman, because he was a
great playwright who happens to also be a great filmmaker, and I've
always been a bit obsessed with this connection between writing and
filming. I've been obsessed with how words become flesh, which is
something that's also beautiful in the writing and filmmaking of
Pasolini. So to me, all the writers who have become filmmakers based
on the process of incarnation or embodiment of the imagination of the
poet are the closest to what fascinates me in cinema.

There's a sense of
poetry in your location too. Although your film is very much rooted
in reality, it seems the clouds and the isolation of the mountains
gives you the license to introduce a sense of mystery into the film.

Oh yes, absolutely.
What was exciting for me was the fact that the thing that should be
the simplest aspect of the film was bringing the most strangeness,
mystery and menace to the story. Because this landscape has inspired
writers, poets, philosophers throughout the 20th century
and the end of the 19th century, it is filled with ghosts,
and the ghosts are very present in the story. It's kind of a ghost
story, you can put it that way. It's not so much the ghosts in the
story, in the house, the ghost of Wilhelm, or whatever, it's the
ghosts floating around this beautiful and peaceful landscape.

This is the first film
you have edited with Marion Monnier, someone whose work with Mia [Hansen-Løve] I have admired in the past. How did you work with her to establish the
rhythm of the film?

The thing is, Marion
was the assistant of Luc Barnier, who had been my editor since I
started making films. Luc was like a brother and he died a couple of
years ago, but when he died I had already worked a couple of times
with Marion. I introduced Marion to Mia, actually, because they are
of the same generation. When we were doing Carlos, Luc was not
available full time because it was such a big film and he had another
project going on, so I really edited half of Carlos with Marion.
Because she was taught by Luc and has been involved as a co-editor
and assistant on many of my films, really she has learned filmmaking
on my films, so we have this very easy relationship. At first I was
scared of the process on this movie because Luc wasn't around, but it
was so simple and obvious, and the thing is that I have always edited
my own films, I mean, I was working with Luc but we were really
co-editing and that's what I was doing with Marion. It was very
simple and efficient and fast.

I liked the way the
film flowed through these fade-outs and ellipses that link the
scenes.

Yes, that has to do
with the way I write. I like the rhythm of books when you have a
sense of the chapters. Something ends and you have a chance to
restart with some kind of new energy, so that's something I try to
reproduce, and I love those fades because hopefully they will renew
the interest and energy of the viewer.

You spoke earlier about
your desire from the start of your career to step out of French
filmmaking and engage with a more global view of the world, and in
this film you look at global cinema through the dominance of
Hollywood blockbusters. Are those films something you look at with
any kind of curiosity or envy?

[laughs] No, It's
another world, it's completely another world. I mean, it's a world
where I am very happy to be a viewer, but I have no envy or anything
like that. It's not the same job, I mean it's genuinely not the same
job. To make those movies you need a knowledge of the cliques of
special effects and having actors on green screens, and it's a much
more technical job that requires skills I don't have. You end up
working with a thousand people but you only know maybe 50 or 60 of
them. When I see those movies I hardly know what the director has
been doing, I mean, he has been giving some overall mood and
supervising various crews. It's just a different job, and far too
technical for me. I would get bored instantly. I'm not idealogical
about it, in the sense that I can break realism if it works for me,
but basically I like filming reality. I like filming real people, I
like to film reality when it's beautiful, when it's ugly, when it's
unpleasant, I don't care. I think when you make movies you capture
something from the present that belongs to the present, and it's
precious because movies are also time capsules. Not that blockbusters
aren't time capsules in their own way. With those movies you can
hardly pinpoint where the creative moment is, and because of the
vastly collective ambition of those endeavours they end up capturing
some kind of collective subconscious. Those movies do tell us
something about the world we live in, often in deep ways, but no I
don't think I could work in that world.

You did come close to
making an American film recently with Idol's Eye. Has that bad experience put you off working in the US?

That was just a nightmare
experience, it was horrible. The thing is that it's just about being
associated with the wrong people and making bad choices of
collaboration, not on my side but on the producer's side. He just got
involved with the wrong people. We haven't put the last nail in its
coffin so it still could happen, but it's still happening in the
sense that you can still get a signal from the black box, or
something like that. [laughs]